 Welcome to another episode of Security Matters. Today, the Sea of Rise committee will be taking over yet another episode from Andrew Lanning. And we are excited to bring you an episode today about the digital revolution as brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic. Pulling back the curtain a little bit in some of our pre discussions and planning for this episode. That was one of the major themes that we had discussed. That initially came to the at this episode with kind of a blank canvas around COVID-19 and some of the business impacts across different sectors of the security industry. And one of the commonalities that we found was this digital revolution that is not only just impacting the security industry, but really businesses around the world. We will be excited to dive into that issue a little bit deeper today, especially considering that we are now reaching the year anniversary into the pandemic as it's really started to impact us here in the States. It was kind of mid-March where the world suddenly started to shift and change and we were forced to all adapt into this new world of global and digital participation. So really excited for what we have for you guys today and bringing a great episode of content around the digital revolution. Yeah, Mark is right. No matter what industry you were in, whether it be physical security, cybersecurity, or any other industry segment, you should have a pivot to maintain business continuity. We've got a great show for you guys this week and I'm excited to introduce our guest this week. With us, we have John Harris from Guidepost Solutions and Sasha Wisekeel with Salesforce. I'm extremely excited to hear a little more from them and see how their organizations or their viewpoints have had to pivot over the last year. Thank you, Matt. So, John and Sasha, to kind of roll things off today, could you give us a little bit of background? Kind of tell us what your roles are and how did COVID-19 initially impact the way your organizations did business? And how do you think that that will change the way that you will do business, not only in 2021, but moving forward? And we'll go ahead and start with Sasha. Great. And first, thanks very much for having me. So, yeah, Sasha Wisekeel with Salesforce. I am the head of our resilience program, which is not only crisis and instant management. I oversee the global operations centers, which a lot of you are probably very familiar with. That's that nice meld of Intel and hardware. I also oversee the business continuity program, which as you can imagine, we hit the big red button on in January of 2020. And then I also oversee risk as it pertains to global safety and security. So when you start looking at what COVID offered us in the last year, not only was I able to spin up our crisis teams and really show their worth to the company, but we sent 50,000 people home basically overnight. And in March, we kind of pretty much closed down the United States, Latam, as well as EMEA, all overnight. So it was an interesting time for us, especially when you look at global operations centers, because we sent them home too. It's not really fair to prioritize somebody's help over another person's health. So when we hit the button, we sent our agents home, we tricked out their home environments so that they could work as impactfully and as efficiently as possible. And we didn't see a drop in their service level agreements to our employees, nor did we, of course, knock would still not see any significant impact to our customers. Our continuity plans really helped us out there, of course. But I think to your point, made the new norm or the new better. The lessons we learned about, certainly with the Go Center, you don't have to be sitting next to each other to be colleagues. You don't have to be sitting next to each other to be impactful and effective. And it's really gonna lead us to sort of reevaluate even our hiring. If we are a work from anywhere that we have a legal entity, work from anywhere company, what does that really mean? It means I don't have to look just in the Bay Area for the talent because it can be a little expensive out here and maybe somebody elsewhere is the right person. It is their dream job. And now I might have a little bit more freedom to be a lot more democratic about the way I look in the way I hire. So, yeah, we had some really interesting lessons learned and certainly throw to John, but more to come on our work from anywhere and the trends I'm certainly seeing in my world. Yeah, thank you. And similarly, you mentioned something such that I share with you and we got involved in COVID response in January. So while the U.S. response and emergence of that started on March 11, it was at a client site for a meeting in the morning. And to meet with the CEO that later that morning and the CSO came in and said, hey, we're shutting it down. We're sending everybody home. You can go back to your home hotel. So, and that was the beginning actually to Chicago the next day to spend one day in our beautiful new office that we had just opened in two crew towers. And the next day, a little did we know that we would never be back in there, you know, for the next year, flew back to Minneapolis and, and that went and then everything kind of shut down. But I first was supporting clients. One client in particular called me right after Christmas, early New Year kind of leading up to new to the Chinese New Year, where they're like, hey, we're hearing some noise in our supply chain. There's something going on above and beyond the regular disruptions that we the shutdowns that happen around New Year. Can you look into it for us? So, so guy post solutions is a global security technology and compliance monitoring organization. We have clients all over the globe. My role I'm director of enterprise solutions. I work with large global organizations to provide a suite of services physical security investigations research and security operations and service the whole bit. So, like, can you look into this for us. We started looking into it. The factories are getting shut down, and, and we were working with them to identify through our different intelligence channels, how they were going to get their factories back open. To deal with this thing coming out of Wuhan. So, so that was January 15. And then we're, we're working with them on that building up that reopening strategy for their China based locations and then all of a sudden, EU, all of a sudden us and then lad am and so we were heavily involved with helping companies figure out how to reopen and build that that plan. Mostly manufacturing organizations and places that were deemed essential. So how do you do that when you can't go there. So I think that was our, our biggest impact that we felt right away is how do we virtualize ours are offering. So typically, client says hey come look at our facility walk it down tell us what's wrong look at our policies meet with us. Now, now that's very limited. Right. So, so we had to strategize around how we deploy our services and capabilities in a virtual manner. We also got very educated really quickly on on the impacts of the coronavirus to our clients and to municipalities that we work with and how we could help them manage through the impact of what it meant for them. So were they going to close down. Then how are they going to monitor themselves and kind of a blackout mode where no one's in the building and and you can't have security officers there because no one can be in there so how do you monitor that. Or if you're critical infrastructure if you're manufacturing how are you going to stay going with screening should you be used we're helping weed out the vaporware technology and say no that that, you know, normal screening isn't going to give you the value that you need to be from there. It's where we're that trusted partner and advisor, but we can't do that unless we understand and we're knowledgeable so the month of March was spent educating ourselves and becoming knowledgeable on how we could best support our, our clients, and then also us like we couldn't go to our offices anymore we couldn't have, you know, I work remotely and I'm connected to Chicago but I work in Minneapolis so for me it was just like, I'm not going to be traveling now it's nothing really changed but we have 200 other employees where, you know, we have a CAD drawing group in Dallas which now had to figure out how to do design work, which is a heavy computing capability from home. So how do we do all that and how do we manage through it so, you know, kind of similarly to what Sasha said but, you know, a different side of the industry where we were supporting organizations like Sasha, we're helping them, how do we virtualize our entire stock how do we take that and do it at home with, you know, proper cybersecurity hygiene, how do we make sure that we're not putting our people or our assets in harm's way because we're no longer inside the infrastructure of the facility connected to the networks that way so it was a, you know, real quick learning curve right out of the chute and luckily, we got a jump on it because of our engagement with with global customers back in January. But it was it was definitely an adventure and through the summer and we're continuing now we're talking about post COVID reopening support as we talked about vaccinations before we started recording here. And that's presenting a whole nother angle and opportunity where we're having support people with. So, you know, for us. We, I think we reacted quickly, and then we looked across our entire portfolio of business and and really looked at what does this mean for us how to respond. And most importantly, how do we support our clients. So John, I think that that's really interesting the pivoting that your company was able to do and certainly Salesforce we got a product out the door within six weeks. Right. That was made by people working from home for the first time. So I thought that was really interesting. I think one of the things that I really want to sort of touch on and that we touched on in our conversation. So today is is the pivoting that we are doing in our industry. If all of a sudden my go centers are not spending 80% of their time responding to alarms, and we're never going to go back to the same pattern, right people are not going to go to the office in the same amounts, we're redesigning our work from anywhere as I mentioned. We're going to pivot their own day to day responsibilities, how do we make what is a strength or a passion of theirs into their superpower. Right, because now they have a luxury luxury of diving into training programs, really being a lot more proactive less reactive. And I think it's going to give our industry a very interesting change and again a pivot from eyes on cameras hit a button, do a response to, how are we predicting what is coming. How are we really looking at the cybersecurity issues, certainly protests, more and more, whether it's against a particular company or, or what we are seeing just geopolitically speaking, certainly here in the United States, and how do we continuously now protect our employees, when instead of having say 160 offices we have 50,000 offices. Right, and so how do we continue to service our employees at the same level with them working really literally from anywhere we have a presence. And so I think it's a challenge for us to challenge our own employees our own go center agents to help us find what that next level of attention and level of service is going to be, because we're never going to go back to what it used to be like, right, it's a new start let's let's bring the lessons we've learned forward and let's like just kill it and stop being just fire people not no offense to the fire people, but instead of you know, putting out the fires right let's identify the risk and mitigate it before the fire starts. You know you raised an excellent point and your universe of responsibility and accountability in your company is you is uniquely placed to see the value of the last nine months I think 2020 is the is the worst plan table top exercise. It may be best plan depending on how you look at it I mean I remember sitting back at like you know security events over the years and you be doing table tops you're like all right, it's a fire, then an active assailant and then you know fire and Britain center people like oh that would never happen. What if I told you there would be a pandemic and massive social unrest and, you know, unbelievable climate activity where shuts down the grid like what who took this madness and shoved it all into one single year. However, what that did to the security industry was put us on the forefront of global attention and you can see the market responding companies are investing in security security companies are being invested in by venture capitalist by by other investment firms because people were like wow, there was a huge immense value here, and everything we used to do was so manual. Look at the opportunity of automation. And so to double tap on something Sasha talked about. If we can look at how those activities that we were that we were forced to do over the last year compounded each other. So now I need to look at, you know, Intel around where our social unrest act so I live in Minneapolis outside Minneapolis this week going to be a very interesting week or this month or forward of everything that's going on, but also there's the opportunity for spark ups to happen in all types of other places no pet that no matter what side of the spectrum you're on. I love that you can get upset about so if I'm not having to pay attention to door forced alarms. And I can pay attention to the stuff that actually has immediate and kind of verifiable impact on my population and with now a workforce like you said I think was beautifully put 50,000 buildings that I'm protecting as opposed to 160. And that you need that type of layered out approach where you're really filtering out the low value data. So that you're only presenting to your operators or your analysts your decision makers, the stuff that matters that requires their innovation or the intervention or attention. And so we're seeing technology come to the forefront from adjacent industries, you know, non security industry saying hey I think I have a tool that can help fix you guys or help you fix your problem that fix us. Instead of us taking, you know hey can I take my access control system and bend it towards a threat analysis system so that I can use it to help me with these other data puts and then it's becoming this like manual process that you have to manage and adjust So I think about in a Sasha your world where you have your folks who can now sit anywhere in the country or anywhere within you know proximity to a to a zip code that you guys think is permissible. And give them a tool set to to observe to kind of hunt for threats and respond and escalate and aggregate. And we're playing offense instead of defense and that just raises our whole industry up to a higher level higher playing field. And I think that's what's exciting for me and you could never say that with the amount of death and economic impact that coronavirus has had that it's a positive thing. The net positive outcome of it for our industry is that escalation of innovation and and pushing us forward. All those things were happening like not a lot was invented brand You knew during coronavirus what it does what it did was just really move forward and faster and quicker the adoption and acceptance of you know cloud based systems and analytics and connected tools and taking IOT methodologies and pushing them into the physical security genre that maybe would have happened over time but maybe that was a 10 year, you know, an adaptation horizon with a much larger adoption chasm that was driven down exponentially because of this unfortunate incident. And John I want to hop on that because that's exactly right and it you know, I've been doing this for more longer, and I want to admit but really since 93, and having done boots on the ground stuff being deployed out to events to what I do now. It's almost sadly always true that our areas are industry, get the attention that we need only after something tragic has happened. You are not considering how to use again, not in a disrespectful way, but if you're not considering how to use the visibility of your departments to ask at least ask I also won't get all the resources I think I need that I really need. If you're not taking this an opportunity to forward an amazing one year three or five year plan of where you're taking your program to the new better than you're really losing an opportunity to be a leader in in the industry and certainly in your company. And to john's point, you know the acceleration is not going from zero to 60 it's a rocket ship. And you got to help drive that rocket, you got to get it up and get it out, because now is the time and, and, and you don't want to be the last company that can send your, your go center agents home, because that's going to be relevant to so many other situations as well, and just flex those muscles make sure that you're putting the policies procedures in place, make sure they have the right equipment, you know, whatever it is you need to do because, again, the working environment is forever changed. And if you're not changing with it I had a conversation with a colleague who said I can't wait to have my go center people back in because I believe they work better I'm like we didn't see that, you know there's a learning curve. But we're not seeing a drop off in the services provided. Right, so that to me is great. That means, again, we can work from anywhere if I have to evacuate my site. We already have the backup we already know what we're doing we already have the support built in so it's just, you know, put your seatbelt on because I think our industry is really changing changing for the better and we need to all be agile, and part of that right I think. Yeah, absolutely. I feel like a lot of the technology that we were kind of forced to implement during coronavirus allowed our companies, you know a lot of companies out there to, like you guys are saying, you know, be ahead of the curve. A lot of the companies were looking at you know new technology and they're like alright maybe in five 10 years. As you guys mentioned but you know this technology was used now to prevent COVID, but it can be used moving forward for the for the next five 10, even more years. You know some of the technology was like people counting or you know all these other technologies that we came out with. Or already had, you know, and it was available but we never really invested in it and COVID kind of like forced companies to invest in it so. So I wanted to, I wanted to ask the other question Sasha in the beginning you mentioned about kind of breaking the barrier for you know the need for for employees to be located in the geographic region of the Bay Area for instance. You know, I think that's a really important thing and I just wanted you to elaborate up on that a little more and in a house sales force is, is, you know, going about that in 2021 and moving forward. Yeah, thanks very much so as I said we do have a bit of initiative called work from anywhere. So, that is being rolled out by our company for this year and you know we took a look at we survey we are a company that communicates all of the time, and we try to be very transparent. And what we're hearing from employees was, I'll go back in the office but it's never going to be five days a week. I'll go back to the office but it's two days a week. And, you know, interestingly enough I had had the conversation with somebody in my Singapore office who was moving back to the Seattle area and and this was before this initiative really, you know again it's rolling out this year this was last year, but he said, look, I thought I had to work in Seattle I thought I was going to have to pay a huge amount of money for a small house with no backyard or, or what have you because I didn't want to have a long commute. And that I was going to sacrifice. And what happened with COVID is, he said, look, we bought something an hour and a half outside of the city, my child has a place to roam. We have, you know, space between homes, and because I can commute twice a week that hour and a half each way. I don't want to do a five days a week right so all of a sudden already the opportunities for people to have better work life balance better decisions that are going to make them happier make them healthier make them better employees in the long term. Right, we're already sort of being done by by people and, and that's the initiative that we're looking at is, is how do we extend that sort of thing to all of our employees to the extent that they wish. I'm a work from the office person I like individually wrapped gummy bears, you know, whatever. And, and so I'll go in and that's, that's great that works for me it doesn't work for everyone and I think that that becomes the most interesting thing is being able to allow employees to tailor their lives so that they can do the best work of their lives. I completely agree and that goes back to this idea of the new better first of all I love that you said that and really turning the idea of work life balance into more of a work life integration. I slowly got to learn a little bit more about our coworkers as children were in the background of zoom meetings and dogs and all these interruptions that in the past we would have thought unprofessional really became a integrated park part of the new workforce for us and I really loved the way that you said, I mean, everyone's each individual strengths into their superpower because I completely agree with you. Each individuals needs are different. Each individual strengths are different. Some people might work really well two days in the office three days from home or even five days from the office, and a little bit of a mix of both but I think that's one of the most fantastic things for the workers of this is that we win in terms of work and life more integrated into each other. And going back to a point john said I really loved how you said the offense versus defense idea. The security industry, historically really for whatever reason hasn't always been the most proactive and the COVID-19 has really forced us to be more proactive, more on the cutting edge of technology, and we really had no other choice than to just jump in head first and get into it. Perfect, perfect. Oh, John, go ahead. No I've just to kind of close out with on the people part I think it really taking a step back and reimagining how the roles in security can be performed is is what it forced us to do. I work with a large recognizable organization that's based here in Minneapolis, and they, they sent all their people home from their headquarters, even the security officers that manage access control, and it became a pilot project to see could virtualize the check in experience into their headquarters, where they were doing, you know where they would have one operator at home versus five or six operators that were usually at a lobby, virtualize the check in process still have some human contact over like video conference and somebody managing there and looking at access flows and monitoring things. And granted you had a much less level of occupancy and entry. It was manageable. And so now as they're re occupying they're taking that into consideration of how could we use these FTC FTS on higher level roles and responsibilities and stretch them into training programs and and and you know use this as a career training exercise. And then this this role, they can take, since we've automated more and virtualize some things out of the lobby using technology, they can take on more activity. And so we can, we can, we're not displacing the human resources and the human capital we're re allocating up the the kind of threshold of output. And what they kind of what they can learn and do an upscaling the industry of that particular area so I think you know that it's not just like a reallocation of all types of people being able to work from home but also how do you re envision how how security practitioners can operate and do more virtually and more automated. Absolutely. Well, thank you so much everyone I say this with complete sincerity and that I truly wish we had more time to discuss this. Your guys thoughts were absolutely fantastic today I feel like we've only scratched the surface on this whole topic we could go for hours and hours and it was an absolute treat to hear you stasha and john today so really appreciate the time. Before we close just wanted to for all the rise people out there. Listening wanted to give one last little reminder of the time mentorship program. We are still looking for mentees for that program, still a great choice to be connected to one of a fantastic industry mentor and get connected in this great program with 12 monthly mentoring session so the link is down below and will be provided as well so still time to get into that and with that we close and say thank you everyone for tuning in today. Thanks very much for having us. Thank you. Thanks for having us take care.